Friday, February 26, 2016

Frankfurter on religious violence

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: "Religious Violence:" A Phenomenology (David Frankfurter).
So this is a call, not just to interpret “representations of violence” in our familiar canon of 2 Maccabees and Josephus, Luke-Acts and Perpetua, Tertullian and the Book of Judges, but to move out into the historical world in which representations inspired pogroms and people were actually burned or dismembered out of some mob’s religious conviction.
Earlier essays in the series are noted here.

Also, this recent post at the ASOR Blog is tangentially relevant to the discussion: Sacred Violence: When Ancient Egyptian Punishment was Dressed in Ritual Trappings [PODCAST].